A Civil War Book Collection for 2002

LR ^ | 02 September 2002 | Donald Miller

[stainlessbanner]

A Civil War Book Collection for 2002

by Donald W. Miller, Jr.

As a boy and teenager I came to know a woman who was born in 1866, one year after the war ended. She was Mary Lyde Hicks Williams, my great-grandmother. She lived in North Carolina in an antebellum plantation home that General Alfred Howe Terry of General Sherman’s Army used as his headquarters during Sherman’s march through North Carolina. Her father fought for the Confederacy at Fredericksburg, Antietam, and Chancellorsville, and led the 20^th North Carolina Regiment in the Battle at Gettysburg. He was captured on the first day of that latter battle after losing eighty percent of his men in two-and-a-half hours of fighting, and spent the rest of the war in prison at Johnson’s Island, Ohio.

His daughter lived in good estate well into her nineties and died when I was eighteen. She took a fancy to me, even though she would remonstrate that I was ill-mannered and should be sent to military school. Mary Lyde Williams was an old-school Southern Presbyterian, who, as a leader in the Daughters of the Confederacy, gave the Presentation Address at the Unveiling of the North Carolina Memorial on the Battlefield of Gettysburg, on July 3, 1929. She had many books on the Civil War in her library, some of which are now in my collection.

Captivated as I was with my great-grandmother and her Southern views on the Civil War, I learned in public school that it was wrong for people like her to support secession and the Confederacy, and for her father and his compatriots to fight and die for it. I was led to believe that a person who says the South did the right thing by seceding from the Union, while not openly admitting it, must secretly approve of slavery.

The first books about the Civil War I began collecting after my formal education was completed were biographies of Ulysses S. Grant. Grant’s own Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant (2 vols., Charles L. Webster and Co., 1885–86) is arguably the best of all the Grant books. David Eicher in his analytical bibliography The Civil War in Books (University of Illinois Press, 1997) says, "Grant’s memoirs comprise one of the most valuable writings by a military commander in history." Not only a remarkable work by a military commander, Memoirs is a great work of literature. Although my views on the nature and significance of the Civil War have changed, I nevertheless continue to collect and read books about General, and later President, Grant. Two recently published ones stand out: Al Kaltman’s Cigars, Whiskey & Winning: Leadership Lessons from General Ulysses S. Grant (Prentice Hall Press, 1998), which encapsulates many interesting facets of Grant’s character; and Frank Scaturro’s President Grant Reconsidered (University Press of America, 1998), a valuable corrective to the view held by mainstream historians that Grant’s presidency was a near-complete failure. (One good thing that Grant did as president was to resurrect the gold standard, which brought on a fifty-year period of economic prosperity in America.)

Collectors group books about the Civil War into these categories: General works, which include Histories and books on Battlefields, Equipment, Common Soldiers, Slaves and Black Americans, Politics and Society, Medical Aspects, Prisons, etc.; Battles and Campaigns; Confederate and Union Biographies, Participant accounts, and Letters; Unit Histories, particularly Regimental Histories; and Civil War fiction. A special set of books in my collection is the Photographic History of the Civil War (Francis Trevelyan Miller, Ed.-in-Chief, The Review of Reviews Co., 1911) that was published on the fiftieth anniversary of the war’s start. David Eicher calls it "The grandfather of pictorial histories," and writes, "This mammoth work is a necessary part of any Civil War library." My set came from my great-grandmother’s library, shortly before most of her collection was lost in a fire. This 3,497-page 10-volume set has 3,389 photographs taken during the war – of battlefields, camp scenes, hospitals, prisons, forts and artillery, army movements, and materiel. Tucked away in one of the volumes was a newspaper clipping from the September 1, 1949 New York Times. It described the last official "encampment" of the Grand Army of the Republic, held in Indianapolis that year. A photograph shows the six GAR veterans who attended the event – the youngest at age 100, the oldest at 108.

There are a few core works that every Civil War book collector will have. Battles and Leaders of the Civil War (4 volumes, Century Co., 1887–1888) is the classic 19^th century work containing 388 articles with 197 maps that were published in the Century magazine between 1884 and 1887. Another is Allan Nevins’ 8-volume history of the Civil War, in three sections titled Ordeal of the Union, 1847–1857; The Emergence of Lincoln, 1857–1861; and The War for the Union, 1861–1865 (Scribners, 1947–71). As befits one of the leading court historians who presents the victors’ view of the war, Nevin idolizes Lincoln and argues that the war was a necessary catalyst for establishing the modern American state.

A listing of core works must include Bruce Catton’s The Centennial History of the Civil War in 3 volumes titled The Coming Fury, Terrible Swift Sword, and Never Call Retreat (Doubleday, 1961–65); James M. McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (Oxford University Press, 1988); and my favorite, Shelby Foote’s 3-volume The Civil War: A Narrative (Random House, 1958, 1963, 1974).

Two resources that I have used in putting together my Civil War book collection are Richard Barksdale Harwell’s In Tall Cotton: The 200 Most Important Confederate Books for the Reader, Researcher and Collector (Jenkins Publishing Co., Austin, 1978) and Michael Mullins and Rowena Reed’s The Union Bookshelf: A Selected Civil War Bibliography (Broadfoot’s Bookmark, Wendell, North Carolina, 1982). Part I of The Union bookshelf contains 114 Annotated Books; Part II, a List of Regimental Histories; and Part III, a List of Participant Accounts.

Four books about the Confederacy belong in every Civil War library. One is Mary Chesnut’s Civil War (C. Vann Woodward, Ed., Yale University Press, 1981), certainly the best of all Civil War memoirs. This well-edited edition won the 1982 Pulitzer Prize in History. Another is Children of Pride: A True Story of Georgia and the Civil War (Robert Manson Myers, Ed., Yale University Press, 1972). The third is Robert Selph Henry’s The Story of the Confederacy (De Capo Press, 1989); and the fourth, Margaret Mitchell’s great American novel, Gone with the Wind (Macmillan, 1936). Those who have read Mitchell’s prose will agree that the book is much better than the famous film based on it. (One bookseller is currently offering this book in a first edition, first printing, in a first-issue dust wrapper, signed by Mitchell in near fine condition for $17,500.00.)

To date more than 60,000 books and pamphlets have been published on America’s Civil War. By serious collectors’ standards I have a relatively small and undistinguished Civil War book collection – three hundred books in all, with only a few of them first editions in fine or near fine condition. But my collection has seven books, all published in the last twelve years, that I consider vitally important in helping one to understand the true nature and significance of the war. They are:

• Francis W. Springer’s War for What? (Bill Coats Ltd., Nashville, TN, 1990)
• Robert W. Johannsen’s Lincoln, the South, and Slavery: The Political Dimension (Louisiana State University Press, 1991).
• Jeffrey Rogers Hummel’s Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A History of the American Civil War (Open Court, 1996)
• Secession, State & Liberty (David Gordon, Ed., Transaction Publ., 1998)
• Lerone Bennett Jr.’s Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream (Johnson Publ.. Co., 1999)
• Charles Adams’ When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000)
• Thomas J. DiLorenzo’s The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda and an Unnecessary War (Prima Publishing, 2002).

The authors of these books reach startling conclusions that stand the conventional schoolbook account of the Civil War on its head.

Until a few years ago, I, like most Americans, had accepted the standard view of the Civil War. In this version, historians portray Abraham Lincoln as one of our greatest presidents because he ended slavery and restored to the Union the slaveholding states that had seceded. But, as James McPherson puts it, Lincoln also engineered "a Second American Revolution." This revolution, in contrast the first revolution of nearly ninety years earlier, established a strong, centralized form of government, an outcome that has rendered the founder’s emphasis on state sovereignty an anachronism.

The first thing one learns from reading the books listed above is that America did not need a war to end slavery. Every other Western country that held slaves in the nineteeth century – which included Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela, and Jamaica – freed them peacefully. The South would have done the same before the century was over. If anything, the fact that seven slaveholding states seceded from the Union when Lincoln was elected president would have sped up the process. As several of the historians above point out, many people in the North considered the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law to be an abomination, and the law would have been repealed if Lincoln had allowed the Southern states to go their own way. The Constitution of the Confederate States of American prohibited the importation of slaves (Article I, Section 9); with their supply thus restricted, and slaves now having a place to escape to, slavery in the Confederacy would have ended as it did elsewhere, without war.

Charles Adams in When in the Course of Human Events and Thomas DiLorenzo in The Real Lincoln show in a convincing fashion that the Civil War was not fought over slavery. It was fought over money and politics. Abraham Lincoln entered office with a political agenda that did not include ending slavery. (Emancipation was introduced as a "war measure," as Lincoln put it, in 1863, in the third year of the war.) Following in the footsteps of Alexander Hamilton and Henry Clay, his idol and mentor, Lincoln sought to create a strong centralized national authority. This would enable him, as president, to implement his long-held agenda of protective tariffs, to shield (Northern) American industries from foreign competition; centralized banking, which would give him control of the money supply; and "internal improvements," i.e., government subsidies to politically favored industries, particularly the railroad and canal-building companies that bankrolled the Republican Party. With no corporate, property, or income taxes then in force, the government’s principal source of revenue was import tariffs; and the South, with the greater number of ports, paid 87 percent of the taxes that the federal government collected to fund its operations and pay government salaries. Lincoln was willing to let the South keep its slaves and enforce the Fugitive Slave Law so long as the Southern states remained in the Union and continued to pay its disproportionate percentage of taxes.

American political history since the founding has been divided into two great camps – the Hamiltonians (beginning with Alexander Hamilton, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and on to Lincoln) who favor a highly centralized state; and the Jeffersonians (beginning with Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, John C. Calhoun, John Randolph, and Andrew Jackson) who espouse a limited, decentralized, constitutional government constrained by state sovereignty. One camp sought to have a Republic that respects and protects individual liberty and property; the other, to establish an Empire where the ends justify the means and the individual is subservient to the state. The American Civil War was a pivotal event for these opposing views of government. Abraham Lincoln prevailed and set the stage for the United States to become an American Empire. We, in 2002, are living with the results – with a currency managed by the Federal Reserve, today’s central bank, that has lost 95 percent of its value; with a continuing diminution of individual liberty and freedom under the thumb of a federal government that regulates every aspect of our lives; and now with suicidal attacks on our home soil by terrorists who hate America and the Empire it has become.

I believe the seven books listed above belong in every serious American Civil War book collectors’ library. Read them, particularly Charles Adams’ When in the Course of Human Events and Thomas DiLorenzo’s The Real Lincoln, and you will begin to view America’s Civil War in a new, more penetrating, and truer light. These scholars give us a much-needed insight into how what is happening in our country today, in the twenty-first century, is in large part a consequence of the outcome of its war that was fought 140 years ago.

September 2, 2002

Donald Miller (send him mail) is a cardiac surgeon in Seattle. He is a director of Prepared Response, Inc. and a member of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness. His web site is www.donaldmiller.com. This article was published in the Summer 2002 issue of The Journal of the Book Club of Washington (Volume 3, Number 1).

Copyright © 2002 by LewRockwell.com

 

[Non-Sequitur]

Ah yes, the ever popular 'slavery would have died out in 10 or 20 or 30 years anyway' song and dance. The fact is that you have absolutely no idea how long it could have lingered. It could have gone on 50 or 75 or a hundred years or more for all you know. There was no interest in ending it in the south in 1861, no emancipation movement, no hue and cry about the injustice of it all, no 'small, minute abolition party' in the confederacy, just $4 billion in human property that the owners were not about to give up easily. Slavery would have continued so long as southern society accepted it, and they were madly in love with the institution. Not just the plantation owners, who depended on it for their livelyhood, but the middle class with their slave maids and cooks and nannies and grooms an dbutlers. Where was the economic incentive for them to free their slaves? What incentive was there to do without their household help? Where would the pressure come from for them to end it? From Northern abolitionists? Nothing but a bunch of foreign busy-bodies. From southern society pressures? Please!

That clause was in the confederate constitution for one simple reason, the southern planters did a brisk business in buying slaves from Virginia and North Carolina. They didn't want to turn that supply off. They weren't about to let anything interfere with their institution of slavery, not even their govenment which is why the confederate constitution also banned any legislation hindering the owning of slaves. So rather than planning for the ending of slavery, the southern leaders started a war that cost the lives of 600,000 men precisely to protect slavery. You condemn the cost in blood to preserve the Union, but you would have happily accepted 600,000 dead, or more, in order to have your southron state.

[stainlessbanner]

It's hard to argue with the facts.

CSA Constitution Section 9.

1. The importation of negroes of the African race, from any foreign country, other than the slaveholding States or Territories of the United States of America, is hereby forbidden; and Congress is required to pass such laws as shall effectually prevent the same.

[stand watie]

try BLACKS IN BLUE & GRAY by professor H R Blackerby, Portals Press.

it's a goodie, sadly out of print.

free dixie,sw

[Non-Sequitur]

It's a shame that of all the great leaders of the war only Lee didn't publish a memoir. Probably because he lived for such a short time afterwards. Pity, it would have been fascinating reading.

[Ditto]

I don't argue the fact that it was in the CSA Constitution, just as it was in the US Constitution. I'm simply saying that the Confederates had no need or desire to import more slaves. They produced more than enough without importation. For the Confederates, banning importation was nothing but a protective tarriff to protect the value of their existing slaves. It was totally self serving, not a statement of their feelings on slavery. That is not even mentioning the fact that they would have had to take on the US, British and French navies if they wanted to re-establish the African slave trade which had been effectivly ended by military might 20 years eariler.

[stainlessbanner]

From time to time, we do agree on things, Non. This is surely a book I would like to read. I often think, Lee in his own humble way, wanted to put that war behind him.

[Non-Sequitur]

I'm simply saying that the Confederates had no need or desire to import more slaves.

Ah, but you're wrong on that. By 1860 demand for slaves in the deep soth was still high. With the importation of slaves officially banned, and with fewer and fewer slaves entering America unofficially, the slave owners in the deep south were meeting their demand by buying slaves from Virginia and North Carolina. There was, in fact, a thriving market in this that would have been shut down had the confederate constitution not protected imports because at the time the confederate constitution was ratified in March 1861 those states were still part of the U.S. Banning all imports would have been cutting off their own nose to spite their face. It's interesting to note that the next clause of the constitution gave the confederate congress the power to end imports completely if they wanted. This is generally seen as a stick to goad Virginia and North Carolina into the confederacy. A 'join or we'll cut you off' kind of threat. As it turns out it took a war to bring about their rebellion.

[Ditto]

The fact is that the statement in the Confederate Constitution went further towards ending slavery altogether than anything in the US Constitution.

How in God's name do you find a clause in the Confederate constitution that had existed in the US Constitution from its creation to be a step toward ending slavery? By 1860, there was not a single slave legally imported into the US (South Carolina never respected the constitution or any law) for over 50 years, yet the slave population of the US increased nearly fourfold in that same time.

They didn't need or want imports. That would have only depressed the value of their existing property.

I swear some of you guys see the CSA as some sort of heaven on earth when it was nothing but a damn feudal kingdom masquerading as a democracy.

[billbears]

I swear some of you guys see the CSA as some sort of heaven on earth when it was nothing but a damn feudal kingdom masquerading as a democracy.

And I swear some of you guys see the USA as some sort of great republic when by lincoln's very actions he had destroyed the Republic and established what amounted to a four year totalitarian state. And what's left is a Socialist Democratic Empire, nothing more. The Republic is dead and has been for 141 years

[strela]

Two glaring omissions:

"Hardtack and Coffee" - the author escapes me at present, but it is a great look at the every day lives of soldiers on both sides.

"Mr. Lincoln's Navy" - same problem (I'm not at home). An excellent account of an under-reported group of fighting men.

I'll post the authors of both of these fine books later.

[dpa5923]

If Ditto concedes that Lincoln's action destroyed the Republic and set up a 4 year totalitarian state will you concede that the CSA was a damn feudal kingdom masquerading as a democracy.

Just want to know. . .

[shuckmaster]

Here's my list of favorites!

[billbears]

That's the one I was trying to think of!! Black Southerners in Gray. Excellent collection of essays on Black Confederates. Also introduced me to James Brewer's The Confederate Negro: Virginia's Craftsmen and Military Laborers which is another excellent resource.

[Ditto]

And I swear some of you guys see the USA as some sort of great republic when by lincoln's very actions he had destroyed the Republic and established what amounted to a four year totalitarian state.

1. How did Lincoln "destroy the Republic"? What is the evidence of that? Aside from the "right" to own slaves, what rights did Americans not have after the war that they had before? Name just one.

2. How can you call a nation that held regular elections, including a hotly contested presidential election, in the midst of its greatest crisis in history, a toleration state?

In the North, one could have anti-war views, have anti-government views, express those views in public, and still be on the ballot and in many cases be elected. The antiwar northern democrats gained seats in the 1862 election. The anti-war democrats were odds on favorites to win the presidency in 1864 until Union success on the battlefield restored Lincoln's popularity while McClellend refused to tow the Democrat party line of immediate peace with the slavers.

How were pro-Union citizens treated in the south? Could they express their views in public? Were they free to run for office? Were they free to criticize their leaders? You know damn well they weren't. Even before the war, could abolitionists preach in the South? Could they freely criticize slavery or slave owners? Could they criticize the slave codes? Did they have first amendment rights there? You know damn well they didn't! It was against the law to even mention abolition in the south. In 1859, Jeff Davis went to Boston and delivered a speech arguing for the expansion of slavery to the west. He had no fear for his life going there. Could Lincoln have gone to Charleston in 1859 and argued for free soil and have lived to tell about it? You know damn well he couldn’t have.

What section was totalitarian?

[billbears]

1. How did Lincoln "destroy the Republic"?

Illegal use of the Whiskey Rebellion, theft of 2 million dollars from the US Treasury to outfit his 75,000 'volunteers', building of ships and purchase of more ships without Congressional approval during their three month 'sabbatical'

How can you call a nation that held regular elections, including a hotly contested presidential election, in the midst of its greatest crisis in history, a toleration state?

Tell the voters in Maryland that. They were required to carry different color ballots, Federal troops not even from Maryland voted in the election, and 31 legislators arrested for doing nothing wrong. Voter fraud Al Gore couldn't have even pulled off

In the North, one could have anti-war views, have anti-government views, express those views in public, and still be on the ballot and in many cases be elected

Would these be the same anti-war folks that were summarily expelled from the country? Or the ones rounded up and thrown in the American Bastille, such as Francis Scott Key's grandson. Or would these be the editors of the newspapers that were shut down for printing anti-war views, some whose presses were destroyed and chased by mobs in the street? As history looks upon this for years to come and more surfaces about this tyrant, April 1861 will be come to be known as the month the Constitution died

[Ditto]

Would these be the same anti-war folks that were summarily expelled from the country?

LOL. Expelled from the country? You guys are so dramatic. That would be the clown from Ohio, Vellingham(sp?), who lost re-election to congress in 1862 because of his rabid pro-confederate stance. He publically advocated that Union soldiers desert from the Army. That is sedition, and any soldier who followed his advice was subject to courts martial and death. As far as being "expelled" he was simply sent over to the confederate side where he belonged. He went to Tennessee, not some Siberian salt mine. He could have been shot, but he wasn't. Lincoln said better to expell one old fool than to have to put a noose around the necks of any young fools who may listen to him.

And since congress approved every penny Lincoln spent in response to the emergency in the spring of 61 when they returned in July, it seems that they had no problem with his decisions. In fact, they even added more money. Nor did the Supreme Court which was stacked with southerners.

Now lets talk about the father of Texas, Sam Houston who as governor in 1861 was damn near hanged by a slaver mob because he opposed secession. Was it 'constitutional' the way the Texas slavers simply drove him from office? Or how about the 60 or so North Texans farmers who were hanged because they were pro-Union. Or the score of Tennessee and North Carolina men who were hanged because they were pro Union? Or the many hundreds who had their houses and barns tourched by the confederate militia. How many pro-southerners were hanged in the North? None. How many southern Unionists had to run for their lives to escape those freedom-loving confederate mobs? Many thousands.

[Non-Sequitur]

Sonofagun, shucks! "Look Away" is still missing from your list of favorites!

[illstillbe]

A ... Time to start building more shelves ... *ping*

[Non-Sequitur]

Let's turn this around, shall we?

1. How did Davis "destroy the Republic"?

By ignoring the requirements of his own constitution, running unopposed in elections, nationalizing industries, siezing private property for military purposes.

2. How can you call a nation that held regular elections, including a hotly contested presidential election, in the midst of its greatest crisis in history, a toleration state?

Well, you've got him there. Davis was appointed to office in the first place and ran unopposed in a sham election months later. Couldn't take a chance on an opponent since I don't believe that Davis never once won an election where he had an opponent.

In the South, one could have anti-war views, have anti-government views, express those views in public, and still be on the ballot and in many cases be elected.

Try again. The first political prisoner of the war was some poor slob of a newspaper reporter who ticked off Braxton Bragg and was thrown in jail the day after the south started the war in 1861. On a per capita basis the south had more people locked up for political reasons than the North did. People were jailed, people were executed, newspapers shut down, all for opposing the war, including former congressmen like John Minor Botts. When the confederate congress suspended habeas corpus in 1862, southern generals like Bragg used it as an excuse to declare virtual martial law in cities hundreds of miles away from the battlefield. Unlike those arrested in the North, who could appeal to the Supreme Court, southern political prisoners had no legal recourse at all since no federal court system was ever established.

I guess that provides a better idea of which section was totalitarian, doesn't it?